Killings Surge in North Bronx, Testing New Police Tactics

A teenager gunned down next to a Bronx playground. A U-Haul truck riddled with bullets after a deadly shootout that involved as many as five gunmen. A tattooed 25-year-old from Massachusetts executed, with three shots to the head, one to the back, on a housing project roof.

“Bury me with Satan,” one tattoo read.

The seasonal return of gun violence — a foreign idea to some New Yorkers but a familiar one in the city’s crime-troubled communities — has come early this year to the northernmost neighborhoods of the Bronx: eight killings, five this month, compared with a single murder at this time last year. The number of shootings has nearly doubled.

For residents, it is a grim departure from the trend in most of the city, where the homicide rate continues its decline, and an alarming omen of what the summer may bring.

“This is the just the beginning,” said Darion Ennis, 30, who found himself running with his mother and children this month after shooting erupted in the playground across the street from their East 215th Street home, days before the killing next to that playground.

For the New York Police Department, the surge in violence in the 47th Precinct, which extends from East Gun Hill Road to the border with Mount Vernon, N.Y., presents an early field test for Commissioner William J. Bratton’s hands-off approach to local commanders.

Told to experiment, the precinct commander here is doing so aggressively, and, in the process, providing a blueprint for how Mr. Bratton’s airy rhetoric of “collaborative policing” might be translated to the street. “We want people who think on their feet,” Stephen Davis, the department’s top spokesman, said. “This style of thing is going to be something that Bratton is in favor of.”

Starting this week, every patrol officer, on foot or in cars, will begin making some sort of contact with a family on every block in the precinct, said the commander, Deputy Inspector Ruel R. Stephenson. And he has also proposed changes to the department’s Operation Impact program, started in 2003, that would allow more local control over when and how crime hot spots are flooded with officers.

That immediate solutions are needed could be heard in conversations across the vast Bronx precinct, which covers neighborhoods known to many as the last stops on the subway lines that stretch there: Woodlawn, Wakefield, Eastchester. There are a handful of public housing developments, but the area is mostly made up of low-lying apartment buildings and single-family homes, many of which are owner-occupied, with cars parked in front. It was apparent on Wednesday, at a packed community meeting with Inspector Stephenson, who took command here last month after leading a precinct in Harlem.

“It’s absolutely insane,” said Brenda M. Francis, vice president of the precinct’s community council. “There’s been violence before, but not like this.”

The suburban-style sprawl of the landscape, which is bordered with highways and cut through by the elevated 2 and 5 trains, is apparent from the settings of the violence: a gas station, a highway access road, a strip-mall barbershop in January. In that case, none of the barbers at Dome Groomers were injured, nor was the intended target.

And no one, on Wednesday, would discuss the shooting. “If he comes back, are you going to protect me?” said one barber, declining to give his name. The area has long been plagued by pockets of violence, residents and the police said. Though other areas of the Bronx have historically been more problematic, this year’s crime spike is the worst in the borough. A rise in killings so far this year across the Bronx — to 27 from 21 — could be attributed entirely to those in this precinct.

“The 47 problem is a significant problem,” the borough’s police commander, Assistant Chief Larry W. Nikunen, said at the community meeting.

No one factor can explain the violence, officials said. It is not a single clash between groups, confined and contained, so much as an accumulation of robberies, deadly family squabbles and turf battles between local crews and marijuana dealers that are scattered across neighborhoods.

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Police officers at Holland Avenue and East 215th Street in the North Bronx, near the location of a recent killing.CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

Several of the shootings have been solved by detectives, often without any assistance from the victims. Others, like the killing of the Massachusetts man, Joshua Bressette of North Adams, present mysteries.

From the rooftop in the Gun Hill Houses where his body was found, the towers of Midtown Manhattan appeared distant in the spring haze. Elevated trains rumbled below, drowning out the jangle of circling ice cream trucks.

It took days for officers to attach a name to the body. Fliers appeared with images of his tattoos and a description of his clothing: a Misfits T-shirt and hat, skateboard-style shoes. Mr. Bressette had been arrested in February on heroin possession charges in Massachusetts, the police there said, and was reported missing this month.

No arrest has been made in his killing, nor in that of Jahbar Campbell, 22, who died in late April in a hail of bullets as he ran with two other men from a group of armed pursuers. There were four or five guns in all. The U-Haul truck sped off but came to a stop nearby, on Reeds Mill Lane. “There is some gang nexus in that case,” Inspector Stephenson said of Mr. Campbell’s killing. Specifically, he added, the Slut Gang, a crew based in the Boston Secor Houses, just off Boston Road.

Rivalries between groups of young men spurred a series of shootings on East 215th Street that culminated in the May 11 killing of Quashawn Thomas, 19, whom the police described as an affiliate of the Big Money Bosses, a local crew feuding with a group called the Young Shooter Gang. There had been gunfire twice on the corner that week, residents said, as young men fired wildly around the park.

“The craziness, it’s an everyday thing,” said Tonya Williams, 29, who moved from North Carolina to the block. Leaning out her second-story window to speak to a reporter on the street, Ms. Williams said she kept her 4-year-old daughter safe by staying indoors and planned to move as soon as possible. “Queens or Staten Island, where it’s quieter,” she said.

Nearby, a pair of patrol officers stood sentry on a street corner as both marked and unmarked police cars passed periodically. “It’s a violent neighborhood,” one explained, declining to be identified. “Be safe,” the other cautioned. “It’s almost dark.”

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Darion Ennis stood near the spot on East 215th Street where Quashawn Thomas, 19, was shot and killed May 11.CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

In an interview, Inspector Stephenson explained his plan to have such officers get to know local families as part of their regular duties. Each would be expected to stop for 10 minutes or so with a family at least once a week, gathering names, numbers and email addresses for collection into a database, he said.

“I’m not trying to create people who are going to snitch,” he said, likening the program instead to a sort of early warning system. “We want to get to the smaller quality-of-life stuff first from the people. We want them to tell us what’s wrong.”

As for officers who may balk at the new requirements, the commander said he would personally ride around with officers who could not make contacts and help them.

On the enforcement side, Inspector Stephenson requested the authority to move around some of the 58 Operation Impact officers who are soon to be assigned to his precinct. He said he would take about half of those officers and place them in small problem pockets as they emerge.

“I have always complained about Impact,” he told the community meeting on Wednesday night. “For example, if I see a shooting by one group and I know that the other feuding group may retaliate, we can defuse it by placing people in those areas to prevent any sort of retaliation. Historically, you weren’t able to do that with an impact zone.” The department’s upper echelons are currently considering the proposal and have yet to approve it.

If approved, it would be the second round of changes to the program, which places groups of young officers in high-crime areas chosen at Police Headquarters. (Mr. Bratton said in January that he would steer away from putting officers who just graduated from the Police Academy into impact zones, sending them first to precinct assignments.)

Whether these measures will have much effect on crime, or improve police relations with the area’s working-class communities and many Caribbean immigrants, will take time to tell.

Some, like Mr. Ennis, who have had to take shelter from gunfire this month, are not sticking around to find out. “My girl is looking for a different apartment,” he said. “I don’t want to live in this area anymore. Too much shooting.”

Correction:

An earlier version of the map accompanying this article misidentified a street within the 47th Police Precinct. It is East 233rd Street, not East 23rd Road.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Killings Surge in North Bronx, Testing New Police Tactics. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe